BATTERSEA Buildings Notes

BRITISH BRICK SOCIETY London Meeting Saturday 27 June 2015 BATTERSEA Buildings Notes

INTRODUCTION

It is difficult to know how to characterise Battersea, a compact London Borough from 1889 to 1974; but now for over forty years the eastern part of the enlarged London Borough of Wandsworth. The upturned –L-shaped area of the former borough was the late medieval parish of St Mary’s, Battersea, but shorn of the remaining outlier at Penge. Post-1066 land alienations make it clear that the original Manor of Battersea had stretched across a swathe of south London south of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s manor of Lambeth. On the southern bank of the River Thames, the northern part of the former borough comprises six distinct areas, the first three from east to west and the second three from west to east: 1. Industrial Battersea, east of Chelsea Bridge and the railway lines into London Victoria. This includes the now infamous Battersea power station. 2. Battersea Park, the area between Chelsea Bridge and Battersea Bridge, including Battersea Park Road and other roads immediately south of the park. 3. Old Battersea, between Battersea Bridge and Wandsworth Bridge, with the original village settlement round Battersea parish church and a secondary, but at times more populous settlement, around York Place where a brick house, long since demolished, was built in the 1470s. 4. Around Clapham Junction. Apart from the relatively new station buildings, there are several commercial and other buildings of interest. 5. Civic Battersea along Lavender Hill; the former town hall (now arts centre) and the public library are part of this area, together with the best of the Anglican churches built in the Victorian era. 6. Park Town. A development of the 1860s and 1870s. In the course of the research for this visit, lists were made of three specific building types: housing estates both Victorian and twentieth-century; Victorian churches; and school buildings. Examples to be seen will be noted individually in the four areas described.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the pioneer social investigator Charles Booth characterised Battersea as “half blue for poverty or black for destitution and half pink for comfortable working class”. The nineteenth-century housing which remains was built for the latter. There are some houses built by and for the late-nineteenth-century middle classes but their occupants seem rapidly departed (see below about T.J. Bailey, for example). There were plenty of long-term employment opportunities in Battersea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the candle-making factory and the flour mills in Old Battersea, both adjacent to the river. Railway work was centred on the London and South Western Railway’s station at Nine Elms and their carriage works at Longhedge. Railway jobs offered stable, year-round employment. If you did not fancy railway work, there was the alternative of the gasworks but many gasworks jobs were seasonal; however, they could be combined with clay winning at a brickyard.

Battersea has not been one of the happy hunting grounds of architectural commentators, who in any case prefer London north of the river to south London. Nikolaus Pevsner in 1952 was typical:

Any but the most enthusiastic sightsee will confine his visit to Battersea to the [parish] church, Old Battersea House, the Ascension, and perhaps, if he is interested in Late Victorian architecture, some of the public buildings.

Ignoring the comment on the specific gender of the enquirer, there is more to Battersea than Pevsner made out.

Brick actually came early to Old Battersea. In the late 1460s, on his own initiative, Lawrence Booth, the Bishop of Durham, began building a brick house in York Place, a small house designed to be a London residence when Durham House, near the city, was taken over for a diplomatic mission as was frequently the case. He continued building the house when in 1476 he was translated to become Archbishop of York, a post he held until his death in 1480. It was used in different ways by his two of immediate successors. Thomas Rotherham (Abp York 1480-1500) was there in September 1482, in February and March 1483, in April 1488, in January 1489, and at various times in 1492: these are all periods when episcopal documents were issued from there. Thomas Wolsey (Abp York 1514-1530) used the site’s brickworks for his extensive alterations to York Place on the north bank of the Thames where government offices now stand on the east side of Whitehall. York Place became Whitehall Palace when taken over by Henry VIII on Wolsey’s fall from power and grace in 1529. After 1530, it seems to have been used far less by Wolsey’s successors as archbishop. Each of Lee, Holgate and Heath are better known for disputes with their tenants rather than residing there although when Holgate was deprived of office in March 1554, the house was plundered and his possessions stolen. In 1556, Queen Mary granted Suffolk Place to the see of York as its London residence: York Place, Battersea, being considered insufficiently grand for England’s second most senior cleric. In 1580, Archbishop Sandys was persuaded somewhat reluctantly to allow use of York House as a prison for papist recusants. Thereafter it was let: in May 1630 to Isabel Peele. As with all property in the hands of senior Anglican ecclesiastics, York Place was sold in 1648. And while restored to the see in 1660, the house was invariably let and the archbishops when in London chose to reside elsewhere. In the nineteenth century, the archbishop had the choice between an hotel or his London club.

INDUSTRIAL BATTERSEA Vauxhall Bridge to Chelsea Bridge

Vauxhall, where the visit begins because it has good transport links, takes its name from Faulkes Hall, named after its builder, the infamous Faulke de Breauté, henchman of King John, and in the reign of Henry III the scourge of more than one county, not least Bedfordshire: he is famed for being besieged in Bedford castle in 1225 and less well-known for earlier building a second castle in Luton, the remnant of the bank of the outer bailey of which was still visible in the early 1950s. The fields shown between Park Street, Crawley Green Road, the River Lea, and the southern edge of the churchyard on Luton’s Tithe Map of 1842 represent the extent of the castle precinct. The building of the castle in the 1221 led indirectly to the destruction of the central tower of St Mary’s church, Luton, in 1336: with much weakened foundations following the great rains of the 1310s and 1320s, it fell down across the south arcade and south aisle. The relatively shallow foundations cut into the gravel knoll on which the church sits had been weakened by excess water seeping into them from the nearby River Lea. Vauxhall was the original location of the Vauxhall Hydraulic Engineering Company which in 1905 moved 30 miles north to a greenfield site on the southern edge of Luton; here it developed into Vauxhall Motors, the well-known motor car manufacturer.

Between Vauxhall and Battersea is an area of redevelopment including the new Embassy to London of the United States on the south side of Nine Elms Road and between the road and the River Thames many apparently upmarket apartment blocks, all glass and steel. Not a brick is to be seen in these.

However, various tall housing blocks on the south side of Nine Elms Road have brick cladding. There is a striking one clad in light red brick, the uppermost storeys of which oversail those beneath them and another in dark brown brick. These are clearly visible from the bus on its left-hand side.

Whilst the large building of the New Covent Garden Market is not built of brick, the outer wall between the site and the road has been constructed of a dark brown brick laid in Flemish Bond.

Battersea between Vauxhall Bridge and Chelsea Bridge was developed as an industrial area long before the now infamous Battersea Power Station was conceived. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the area between the river and the principal railway line from London to a swathe of southern England from Portsmouth to north Devon and north Cornwall was turned into a great mass of small scale industrial enterprises, among them brickworks, tileworks and ironworks. Hitherto, the main road from Lambeth to Wandsworth had been a pleasant country road lined by elm trees, hence its name ‘Nine Elms’. These enterprises had mostly disappeared before the building of the power station but one reminder of their prevalence is the Waterworks Pumping Station on Kirtling Street. The ‘sub- Georgian’ beam engine house of circa 1840 is built in brick. Industry was thus well-established when the first half of Battersea Power Station was erected in the years between 1929 and 1935; the second half was not built until 1944-55 and had a comparatively short life, both parts being closed in 1983. Regrettably, saving the great bulk of the power station has become a “cause” for the Twentieth Century Society which has coloured much of the writing about the structure, still impressive in its damaged state. No one seems to know what to do with this great hulk, but because Sir Giles Gilbert Scott got involved one influential body of opinion (the Twentieth Century Society) thinks that it should be preserved in perpetuity. There is, however, a contrary view, ably expressed by Thom Gorst in The Buildings Around Us:

Yet even if these great buildings helped to turn the industrial shed into architecture, it needs more than this historical achievement to justify keeping them. Certain questions need to be asked. Is there a social benefit in doing so? Are the buildings worth saving in any case? And, perhaps most important of all ― who says so?

When it was opened to the public one weekend in 2006, this writer went to have a look. Its tortured recent tenurial history could reduce a strong man to tears: prime real estate with more than one shady financial deal rather than an important brownfield site in a very central area which could be developed as much needed social housing for local people, and not the glass-fronted, expensive flats for outsiders as the current proposals have them. That the land was seen as just a financial commodity was made clear in the week after the opening of the power station on the Saturday when the whole complex was sold by its then owners, an Irish property company; this was despite showing grand plans for the development of the derelict structure and the adjacent land. What we have is a building without its machinery, of no purpose except for the one for which it was built, but the brickwork is sound and while some of the internal reinforced concrete may be in need of replacement this mostly seems not to have been too severely damaged by several decades’ exposure to the elements. In the blurb about Battersea Power Station in 100 Buildings, 100 Years Gavin Stamp half- heartedly acknowledges the role of Halliday & Agate in the design without telling the full story. Proposals for a coal-fired central London power station were first mooted in about 1923 and aroused considerable hostility, even provoking King George V to write more than one letter to query the validity of the site given its proximity to a large proportion of the population of a city of eight million inhabitants: coal fires for domestic and industrial use as well as for power generation contributed to the smog, the celebrated London fogs, and were the indirect cause of many deaths until the Clean Air Acts of the1950s. However, design work on the power station began in the late 1920s and building commenced in 1929. The engineer was S.L. Pearce with H.N. Allot as consultant. Theo Halliday, the partner of the Manchester-based practice Halliday & Agate in charge of the job, was the architect for the exterior brickwork and the interior faience and terracotta. The tiles and the faience were supplied by Shaws of Darwen, Lancashire, who have been involved in discussions about a restoration of the interior (as was relayed to members of the society on its 1996 visit to the firm.) Unfortunately, Theo Halliday died suddenly early in 1933 when in his early fifties; George Agate, a much older man and already semi-retired and wishing to spend much more of his time at his north Wales home and on the golf course, wrote to Scott in the latter’s capacity as President of the Royal Institute of British

Architects seeking advice and suggestions as to who might take the project forward. Scott obliged and created the blueprint for sundry power stations across England over the following twenty or more years. Scott did design the chimneys, not yet built when Theo Halliday died. Scott’s practice was responsible for overseeing the last two years of construction for the west half and a decade later, after the Second World War, for the whole of the eastern half of the power station.

East of the tracks of the LCDR is the Battersea Dogs Home. Its most recent buildings have bases of brick, very light yellow in colour and laid in Stretcher Bond.

Long-term users of London Victoria, for Kent or the Brighton line or the Boat Train and those exotic destinations east of Calais we explored in our youth, will remember the gasometers. Alas, they are no more. Two huge telescopic gasometers stood north of Battersea Park Station. Demolition began in 2014 and was completed before Christmas 2015. Between its staring role one Sunday evening in the recent BBC2 series ‘Demolition’ and the author’s visit two weeks later, the gasometer had been reduced to one-third of its original size. This brownfield site is to be developed jointly by National Grid and Berkley Homes in the St William development.

East of the railway viaducts is a triangular space between Battersea Park Road to the south, Prince of Wales Road to the north and the viaduct to the west. There is a series of late nineteenth-century blocks in stock brick with crow-stepped gables built for various, linked institutions of the Roman Catholic Church: three schools, a convent and a church. Apart from the church they are in other uses. In the middle of the railway viaduct side of the triangle is the Roman Catholic church dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Joseph. Built in two phases: the lady chapel on the west side was designed by Charles Adrian Buckler in 1868 whilst the nave and three-sided apsidal sanctuary followed in 1879 to designs by A.J. Adams. The building is in stock brick laid in English Bond with red brick used for the window and door surrounds of the nave and sanctuary. Many specials are used in the red brick. The presbytery was built beyond the end of the church. Across the road from the church is the building formerly used by the sisters of the Convent of Notre Dame. On Battersea Park Road are the single-storey buildings of St Joseph’s Boys School of 1882 to which additions were made in 1891. From west to east along Prince of Wales Road were St Mary’s Girls and Infants School, designed by C.A. Buckler in 1869 and opened on 5 January 1870, conveniently in time for the Spring Term, multi-storey premises now a Seventh Day Adventist church; what was originally a Higher Grade School and became Notre Dame High School for Girls; and single-storey premises, now demolished, comprising a lavatory block and a laundry. The last two have been demolished and replaced by new structures.

Alongside Queenstown Road, the road into Battersea from Chelsea Bridge is the multi-track viaducts of the nineteenth-century railway companies which plied their trade from London Victoria, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway to the east and the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway to the west. At the northern end of the tracks is the Grosvenor Railway Bridge, originally built in 1859-60, widened to the east for the LCDR in 1865-66 and to the west for the LBSCR in 1901-05. The whole of the railway bridge was rebuilt in 1963-67 by Freeman, Fox & Partners. A predecessor of this firm, Sir Charles Fox, was responsible for the widening of the LBSCR side whereas John Fowler did the LCDR part. There are ten tracks crossing the river. What is there today alongside Queenstown Road is a solid wall of railway arches in dark blue, almost black, engineering brick. Under these are small businesses, one of which in Edwardian England and the 1920s and early 1930s was Short Brothers, aircraft builders.

BATTERSEA PARK AND AREA Chelsea Bridge to Battersea Bridge

Battersea Park was the second public park to be created by the Metropolitan Board of Works. Plans were drawn up in 1844 for turning the notorious Battersea Fields into a more salubrious area but nothing was done until ten years later, in 1854. The park and its adjacent streets were laid out in that year but the river was not embanked until seven years after that (in 1861 and 1862). The various ponds, visible on early maps, were infilled with earth from the building of London Docks but one of the ponds was enlarged to form the 15 acre (6 hectare) boating lake. The pumping station of 1861 is there to fill the lake. The park is bounded by Queenstown Road to the east, Prince of Wales Drive to the south, Albert Bridge Road to the west and Chelsea reach of the River Thames to the north. Of these, only Prince of Wales Road with big, nineteenth-century houses deserves more than a passing glance. Both the site of the old version and the new building of All Saints church and its red brick vicarage are at its extreme east end.

The former All Saints, Battersea Park, stood on the corner of Queenstown Road and Prince of Wales Drive, where the flats now are. Built in 1882-83, it was designed by F.W. Hunt. The Victoria County History of Surrey records its appearance. A red brick building in thirteenth-century style, it consisted of a chancel with an apse, a north-east chapel with an apse, a four-bay nave with clerestory, low aisles, a central tower with a pyramidal roof and turrets. The arcades are grey stone columns with red brick arches. The wooden roofs are covered with slates. In 1952, Pevsner described it as “dull, not undignified, red brick with lancet windows”. This church was demolished following a fire in 1969. The new All Saints Battersea Park is on Prince of Wales Drive, west of the vicarage, whereas its predecessor had been on its eastern side. Designed in 1976 by David Gill, this small building was erected on the site of the former church hall. Built in a buff-brown variegated brick laid in Stretcher Bond, the church has a strange appearance with a tall, slightly tapering slab of brickwork with a raised cross in brick above the street front. The brickwork supports a clerestory consisting of two glazed right-angled triangles, providing light to the sanctuary. All Saints Vicarage was built in 1890. It is two storeys and an attic and is two bays to the front and three bays to the sides. Built of red brick laid in English Bond, the left bay of the front and the centre bay of each side all rise to a gable.

On Prince of Wales Road there are long terraces of mansion flats which have views overlooking the park. Most are four or five storeys and built in red brick.

Battersea Park Road is south of Prince of Wales Drive; this was originally part of the principal road from Wandsworth to Lambeth. At the west end of the road are the Life Tabernacle United Pentecostal Church, two buildings for the Peabody Trust, the buildings of the former Battersea Polytechnic, whose outer shell remains, and the Park Board School.

The brickwork of the front of the Life Tabernacle of the United Pentecostal Church has been painted white making it difficult to see the bond or the original bond or brick colour although the bricks of the upper parts of one of the two side towers seem to indicate the use of Flemish Bond. The side walls are red brick laid in Flemish Bond. The street front to the north has a broad central section rising to a gable with five windows. The centre one is higher and broader than the others; the next two narrower and shorter, and the two outer ones narrowest and least tall of the group. Entry is by doors at the foot of the outer towers. The side walls have four tall gabled windows giving light to the assembly hall. The building was originally the lecture hall of Battersea Park Tabernacle, and was constructed in 1869-70 by the builder William Higgs of Lambeth, a lay associate of Charles Henry Spurgeon. Higgs probably designed the building. In front of the lecture hall, a church was built in 1883-84 to the designs of William Allen Dixon, with an Italo-Byzantine façade using ‘Malins’ brick and Bath stone for the dressings. The chapel was demolished in the 1970s and its site used for a car park for the remaining building.

Buildings for the Peabody Trust include one in the course of construction in May and June 2015. It is adjacent to existing sheltered housing erected by the Peabody Trust in 1984. The new building is built in a light buff brick, with the south-east corner of the ground floor as solid walling in Flemish Bond, the headers of which are pushed out by about an inch. The west part of the ground floor of the new building is to be used for shops. Stretcher Bond is used on the upper floors which oversail the ground floor. The earlier building, the original part of the sheltered housing at Elmwood Court, was built using a very dark brick. A recent adaptation of the ground floor is in the same light buff brick as the new portion and is also in Flemish Bond with protruding headers.

The buildings of the former Battersea Polytechnic were the second of Edward Mountford’s three civic buildings in Battersea. Designed in 1891, it was built over the next two years and added to by others over the following two and a half decades. The front to Battersea Park Road is in red brick laid in English Bond with a fair amount of stone dressings. According to Pevsner and later Bridget Cherry, the development of the architect’s building style suggests movement towards the Edwardian Baroque. In 1909 Mountford’s successor in practice, Frederick Dare Clapham, designed the library on the building’s south side to externally look like a chapel and also made further additions to the main building in 1912. The library was built in red brick in English Bond with much use of stone but, interestingly, the circular windows on the upper part of the north wall are partnered by swags in a ceramic building material: it is difficult to see whether this is moulded brick or unglazed terracotta. The building has a complicated tenurial history. Battersea Polytechnic as an institution lasted until the establishment of technological universities in the early 1960s as counterpart to the wave of new universities established following the Robbins Report (1962). Battersea Polytechnic became the University of Surrey and moved out to Guildford. (The former Bristol College of Technology moved out of its city centre and suburban premises in Bristol to go 20 miles down the road to a greenfield site outside Bath and became the University of Bath). When Battersea Polytechnic ceased to exist, the buildings were taken over by a tertiary college, Westminster Polytechnic. But in the early 2000s, this moved on and the site was turned over to developers who had to retain Mountford’s outer walls on the east, south and west sides. Some of the principal internal features were retained but most have been emasculated when the shell of the building was redeveloped as upmarket housing in the early 2000s. The rear part of the site faces Lurline Road, where new flats have been built in ed brick using Stretcher Bond.

On the other side of Forfar Road is Park Board School, the second school in Battersea to be opened by the London School Board; it was opened on 14 April 1874: the now demolished Winstanley Road School had been opened by the LSB a term earlier on 5 January 1874. Park School was enlarged eastwards in 1893. In 1902, it had 1488 pupils. Park School was built in stock brick laid in English Bond with red brick used for the corners and window surrounds. The larger windows in the 1893 section have roll-edged bricks to the sides and arched top of the window surrounds of the ground and first floors, facing Forfar Road: the windows of the second floor classrooms have straight-headed lintels. Facing Battersea Park Road, the centre section has been rebuilt on the top floor in a brick which is not quite matching the earlier work but the rebuilding was done in keeping with the earlier work. Windows here have concrete lintels. The stock brick and red brick combination is found in several of the surviving LSB buildings in Battersea, as, for example, in two schools now converted into gated housing complexes: Lavender Hill School of 1891 and 1893 and the higher grade school on Surrey Lane, first opened on 9 March 1885. It is possible to evaluate how far the LSB was successful in providing sufficient elementary school places in Battersea in the thirty years of its responsibility for education. Prior to the board being established there were something over 4,600 school places in the borough, split between provision by the Anglican Church (about 3,350 pupils in 1902), the Roman Catholic Church (685 pupils), a Wesleyan foundation (550 pupils), and one nondenominational British School (unknown number). At the end of the century, 26,990 pupils were enrolled in all Battersea Schools, 21,986 in LSB schools.

In 1871, the borough had 54,016 inhabitants; three decades later there were 168,905 people living in Battersea, an increase of 212.7%. There were over three times the number of people in the borough at the end of the nineteenth century as there had been thirty years before. If we take it that in 1870 there were between 4,500 and 5,000 school places in Battersea, the figure of 26,990 pupils on school rolls in 1902 suggests that the increase in provision was significantly more than four-fold. In 1902, there were approximately five and a half times as many children in school as there had been in 1871. The LSB had built sixteen schools, several of which had been enlarged more than once.

On the opposite side of the road is Battersea Park Library, a relatively modern building in a dark brown brick laid in Stretcher Bond.

At number 7, Alexandra Avenue, is the former St Saviour’s Vicarage designed by John Oldrid Scott for his cousin, Stephen Gilbert Scott, who was the first incumbent of St Saviour’s church on Battersea Park Road. The house is three storeys above a semi-basement and has three broad bays to Alexandra Avenue, where the uppermost storey is represented by dormer windows in the attic. The central bay is abroad entry approached by steps on the north side of the bay. There is a gable in the east bay on Prince of Wales’ Road. Constructed using a good quality grey brick, either Luton Greys or an equivalent brick from one of the brickyards in Reading, the bricks are laid in Header Bond with red brick as diaper patterns. Some red bricks are laid in Stretcher Bond. The principal windows on the ground floor have labels beneath them in good quality red brick which is laid in English Bond. (For St Saviour’s church and the new vicarage, see below.)

Leading west from Alexandra Avenue is Warriner Gardens, the east end of which is taken up by a complex known as The Quadrangle, a collection of relatively upmarket flats built round an internal square utilising on Warriner Gardens former industrial buildings. The first building is twenty bays in length along Warriner Gardens with a gable to Alexandra Avenue; it terminates in a second building represented by a three-bay gable. In the building which is long side on to Warriner Gardens there is a buttress every five bays. Both buildings are in stock brick laid in English Bond with red brick used above door and window surrounds. Along the west side of Alexandra Avenue is a modern, four-storey block using reclaimed and cleaned stock brick, and there is another block using these materials at the west end of the complex. Both blocks have a frontage on Battersea Park Road. Here between them is a five-storey block in red brick.

Adjacent to the Quadrangle is Dennis’s Albert Residences, 61-67 Warriner Gardens, a group of three- storey houses in stock brick laid in Flemish Bond with three rows of red brick at lintel level.

The Old Imperial Laundry occupies a long site bounded on the north by Warriner Gardens, on the east by other buildings, on the south by Battersea Park Road, and on the west by nine modern houses on Beechmore Road. This complex of one and two storey buildings is now used as photographic studios and other small-scale enterprises. The frontage to Warriner Gardens is painted green, obscuring the details of the brickwork; however, the main details can be seen on the frontage to Battersea Park Road. Here, the lower part of the walling is blue engineering brick with stock brick in English Bond used above this. There is some red brick over the fenestration. One interesting feature is the fragment of an original name board in dull brown terracotta, one piece for each letter or space; only half of this survives. Also in brown terracotta is a row of rosettes beneath the eaves.

At 142 Battersea Park Road is the proudly-built premises built for and formerly occupied by Properts. They were obviously doing well when they erected it. This seven-bay building is two tall storeys with an attic above a basement. The seven bays are arranged 1-2-1-2-1. This is constructed in stock brick laid in English Bond, with some red brick above the windows. Between the windows of the raised ground floor and those of the first floor is an elaborate panel made up of special bricks.

St Saviour’s church, Battersea Park Road, was built in 1870-71 to the designs of either E.C. Robins or G.R. Roper; in 1872, it became a parish church. The church was built using roughly squared ragstone with Bath stone as dressings in a thirteenth-century style. There is a chancel, transepts, a nave with a low clerestory, low aisles beyond five-bay arcades, but no tower. The roofs are slate and there is a fleche with one bell over the chancel arch. The (liturgical) west front has three doorways. Bridget Cherry called it “undistinguished”. Given the loss of Anglican churches in Battersea, the fact that its notice board proclaims it to be “a lively international church” speaks volumes of its importance to the local community. The modern St Saviour’s Vicarage is next door to the church, on its western side. This two- storey detached house with integral garage was built in a light yellow brick streaked with black: the only indication that it has ecclesiastical connections is the black brick cross in the gable facing the street. The majority of the brickwork is in Stretcher Bond. The new vicarage seems to have been built on the site of the former St Saviour’s Infants School, a church school for which neither building date nor pupil numbers were recorded by A.F. Leach in VCH Surrey.

Brynmawr Road between Battersea Park Road and Prince of Wales’ Drive has late-nineteenth-century single occupancy houses in long terraces, a building type which could be seen in many London suburbs built in the 1880s and 1890s. These not unattractive houses are two-storeyed, built of stock brick in Flemish Bond, with some use of red brick and tiled roofs. They were typical homes of those who were looked down upon by the Bloomsbury gang, that group of writers and artists headed by Leslie Stephen’s daughters, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and including their lovers, friends and hangers-on. John Carey, a product of the solid middle class of Putney, the Thames suburb on the other side of Wandsworth from Battersea, caught the cynicism of the group in The Intellectuals and the Masses. Two-storey houses are comparatively rare among dwellings built in Battersea in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period, the population of the borough rose from 19,660 in 1861 to 54,016 in 1871, an increase of 175%. In the next decade, it almost doubled to 107,262 in 1881. In the 1880s, another 43,000 people came to live in the borough, giving a total population of 150,558 in 1891; and there was another but smaller increase in the 1890s. The 1901 figure of 168,905 remained roughly constant until the aftermath of the Second World War. In the 1951 census, there were 117,000 inhabitants of Battersea; the number is now (2015) in the region of 100,000 people.

Returning to Battersea Park Road, there are some individual buildings: two public houses, a pair of villas beneath a single gable, a series of almshouses, a housing estate, and a church.

The first of the public houses is The Lighthouse, in red brick in Flemish Bond with much stone and stucco. It is three principal bays with a smaller side bay to the west.

Adjacent is the pair of villas beneath a single gable facing the road, Shakespeare Villa and Byron Villa, of two storeys above a basement with a window in the upper part of the broad gable. They are in stock brick laid in English Bond with some use of a reddish brown brick. Cherry suggests a mid- nineteenth-century date.

The almshouses are long ranges on the north side of Battersea Park Road. The two-storeyed Dovedale Almshouses were built in 1841 using stock brick in Flemish Bond and much stone. To their west are the Blunden Almshouses, originally built in 1971 in memory of George Blunden (1895-1970) but apparently rebuilt in 1997, using stock brick in Stretcher Bond with artificial stone.

The second public house is The Latchmere, a big corner pub in an Italianate style.

Between the south side of Battersea Park Road and the east side of Latchmere Road is the Latchmere Estate, of 1903, the first housing estate built by a borough in London. The local MP, John Burns had successfully lobbied for London boroughs to be able to take up the provisions of the 1890 Housing Act. Built on the north side of the many railway lines, the estate includes Reform Street, Freedom

Street, and Burns Street. Battersea Borough Council, using the architectural assistant in the borough engineer’s department, W. Eaton, provided 300 cottage flats, each of which had garden space. Within the tight space of the estate was a recreation ground, north of Reform Street. Social provision included the demolished Wandsworth and Clapham Union Dispensary of 1886, designed by T.W. Aldwinkle; and the demolished Latchmere Baths built in 1889. The children would have attended the Latchmere Street School of 1883 and 1891, which have been converted to housing. The first phase of building was the last school designed by E.R. Robson for the London School Board.

The former St Stephen’s church, on Battersea Bridge Road, corner of Battersea Park Road has been closed as an Anglican church; it is now used by a Pentecostal church, the Assemblies of the First Born. The church was built to the designs of William White in 1886-87 using a late thirteenth-century style. There is a small, three-sided apsidal chancel with tall two-light windows, a nave with clerestory and low aisles without windows. The apse is above a basement which extends into the north-east tower. Atop the tower is a broach spire. This four-bay building of stock brick in Flemish Bond has much use of red brick, but stone was employed for the clerestory windows. When it closed, some of the fittings were transferred to the new church of Christ Church and St Stephen. In the 1870s and 1880s William White designed six churches in Battersea for the Diocese of Winchester, later all incorporated in the Diocese of Southwark. St Stephen’s was the last of these. He began with St Mark’s, Battersea Rose, in 1872-74 (see below). The demolished St Peter’s, Plough Road, followed in 1875-76, and also demolished is the bombed St Matthew’s, Rush Hill, of 1876. St Michael, Wandsworth Common, of 1881 remains but the incomplete St Mary-le-Parc, Albert Bridge Road, of 1883 was an early casualty after the Second World War.

OLD BATTERSEA Battersea Bridge to Wandsworth Bridge

Until the end of the eighteenth century, Battersea was a small riverside village surrounded by marshes which made its living from market gardening and the supply of vegetables to London. It is a pleasant irony that the New Covent Garden at Nine Elms reasserts that tradition, albeit inside the buildings of a wholesale market rather than outside on semi-agricultural land. The buildings are described in the approximate order of viewing.

On Bridge Lane is the former Surrey Lane Higher Grade School, designed in the period of transition between E.R. Robson and T.J. Bailey as chief architect to the London School Board and opened on 9 March 1885. A chemical laboratory was added in 1896 and a department for deaf children in 1898. The novelist Richard Church was a pupil here between 1901 and 1905. The building fronting the street is three storeys with an attic but a separate three storey building in the former playground (now car park) behind this has a flat roof. The latter has a square stair tower with an ogee-shaped, lead-covered roof. There are various single-storey buildings to the south of the premises. All buildings are in stock brick laid in Flemish Bond with red brick used for window surrounds and as buttresses. The front to Bridge Lane has much greater use of red brick. On the south wall of the main block is a panel saying ‘LSB’ but without a date. Higher Grade Schools were an attempt by school boards to provide education for children aged thirteen and above for two further years, sometimes three years, when the legal school leaving age was still thirteen in London, twelve in many other parts of England and Wales: the school leaving age did not become fourteen until the Balfour Education Act of 1902. The London School Board led the way in providing this extended educational provision, much of which was of a technical nature. It was taken up by the school boards of larger towns, including Luton and Oxford. The building on Waller Street, Luton, was demolished in the late 1960s but those in Oxford remain. The girls’ school is on New Inn Hall Street and is now part of St Peter’s College: members viewed this in April 2015. The

9 boys school is the other side of Gloucester Green, it had a stint in the 1970s as the bus station waiting room, in the 1990s as the town’s information office; it is now a restaurant.

In its present form, the parish church of Battersea, dedicated to St Mary, was erected in 1775-76 to the design of its churchwarden, Joseph Dixon. But there was an earlier church, first mentioned in 1157 but possibly a century older as the church and the manor of Battersea were given to Westminster Abbey by William the Conqueror. Originally it a chancel, a nave and a west tower: the riverside village was a small one. The first recorded alteration was the provision of a new eastern gable to the chancel, engineered by the king’s mason, Henry Yevele in 1379, at the same time as he was working on Westminster Abbey: the Infirmarer’s accounts for this work survive. The present east window is Yevele’s stonework filled with a mixture of medieval and early-seventeenth-century glass, mainly the latter. At either end of the fifteenth century, additions were made: a south aisle in 1400, a south chapel in 1489. Apart from regular maintenance, no further substantial work was done until the first half of the seventeenth century: a north aisle in 1613 and a new tower in 1639. An early-eighteenth-century print showing the latter appears to suggest a tall, three-stage structure which apart from the cupola on top could be taken for late medieval in date. By the 1770s even the enlarged building was insufficient to house all of Battersea’s population. Above a basement, Dixon’s 1770s church was designed as a preaching box, externally in stock brick laid in Flemish Bond and gone very dark; there are stone quoins. Internally, the galleries extend round three sides, hence the two rows of five windows each with the upper ones round-headed but the lower series is segmental-headed. The chancel is three-sided with the north and south sides curved and the east wall straight. Elizabeth and Wayland Young record the tribulations of pulpit placement between 1776 and 1879: original plans were for a central pulpit, then one at the west end, before the compromise of pulpit to the north-east and clerk’s and reader’s desk to the south-east. But in 1826, the two were amalgamated and a central triple-decker created. Arthur Blomfield supervised the restoration of 1876-78; sensibly he chose to retain the present small apsidal chancel having advised against a new one. Apart from the stained glass of 1631, Dixon’s church retains various monuments from the old church, most notably to the St John family, the lords of the manor from 1627 to circa 1763; some of them lived in Bolingbroke House. The square tower culminates in a recessed octagonal stage with four clock faces above which is an octagonal spire. The tower is only half engaged by the body of the church. The lower part of the west front is a tetrastyle Tuscan porch below a plain pediment in front of the tower and small two-storeyed, flat-roofed projections clasping the tower. All of this is white, in contrast to the much darker brick.

Immediately north of the parish church is Montevetro, one of three recent creations which scar the riverside of Old Battersea despite being the work of two celebrated members of the 1950s/early 1960s generation of English architects. Without a brick between them are Foster Associates Offices of 1990 close to Battersea Bridge, Montevetro by Richard Rogers Partnership of 1994 immediately north of St Mary’s church, and Foster & Partners ‘Albion Riverside’ of 2003. The two Foster buildings show how that large practice’s style evolved in just over a decade from not quite a pastiche of the Seagram Building in New York to a reliance on curves: the Swiss Re offices, 30 St Mary Axe (ie ‘The Gherkin’) of 1997-2004 and City Hall of 2002 come from the same mould as Albion Riverside. The double height offices of Foster Associates are topped by five floors of flats and penthouses. All three are gated communities; it is as if the one percent has no greater wish than to be insulated from the ninety-nine percent. All three reinforce the irrefutable conclusion that central London has became the world of “El tenor et el no tenor” and these three ― respectively a slab, a slanting slide, and a boxer’s glove held open ― clearly belong to the world of “the haves”. The proposals for yet more multi- million pound penthouses planned for that valuable brownfield site, Battersea Power Station, have already arrived on the other side of Battersea Park.

On the opposite bank of the river is Lots Road Power Station, Chelsea, now not in use and perhaps awaiting demolition. This has been the case for many years. Writing a quarter of a century ago, Bridget Cherry said that its future was “uncertain”.

Built in 1902-04, its purpose was to generate electricity for the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. This early conglomerate, led by the American financier Charles Tyson Yerkes, controlled the District Railway, and secured £15,000,000 worth of American money (in the exchange rate of the day, something like $73,000,000) for three newly-conceived lines: the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (now the Bakerloo Line), the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (now the Piccadilly Line), the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (now one branch of the Northern Line). Yerkes did not live to see these completed Lots Road is a long building, with a total length of 4532 ft (138 metres). It was the world’s first electricity generation plant to exclusively use steam turbines. These were fed by coal delivered on barges plying along the River Thames. When built, it was the largest electricity power station in the world. It had eighty boilers and eight steam turbines which generated the electricity. In 1902, the building was an early example of the use of a steel frame in London, predating the Ritz Hotel by two years. The upper part of the frame can be seen exposed above the brickwork. The outer cladding is brick with terracotta. Prominent along the sides are large arches, giving the building greater dignity. The designer of the building is uncertain. The chief engineer of the United Electric Railways Company of London was J.R. Chapman. The company’s architect from 1903 to 1907 was Leslie Green who is better known for his forty-three ox-blood red faience clad railway stations from the Elephant & Castle in the south to Golders Green in the north and from Earls Court in the west to Finsbury Park in the east, all designed in less than four years. Green or one of his assistants, Stanley Heaps or Israel Walker, was probably responsible for the exterior brickwork and possibly the overall plan. Arrangement of the boilers and turbines would have been left to Chapman.

Four roads meet at Battersea Square. The first building on the east side of Battersea Church Street is a former public house, The Raven, now a restaurant. This has curving gables in the Dutch manner and below the windows of the ground floor glazed brown bricks. A mid-seventeenth-century date is suggested. Diagonally opposite this is Ship House, a five-storey, five-bay former warehouse in stock brick laid in English Bond. Red brick is used for the corners and the buttresses dividing the bays, and also for the triple row of headers used in the arched lintels. The former vicarage, 42 Vicarage Crescent was probably built about 1800 a generation after the church was rebuilt. The vicarage is three storeys and five bays. Adjacent is Devonshire House, also three storeys and five bays, but perhaps a century earlier in date. Old Battersea House is late-seventeenth-century house restored by Vernon Gibbard between 1972 and 1974. The original builder is unknown but the frieze with a globe and navigation instruments may indicate that Samuel Pett, Controller of Victualling to the Navy, who is known to have lived in the house in the later seventeenth century, may be the person for whom the house was built. The nine- bay west front facing the river is divided by two blind windows flanking the central three giving the arrangement as 2-blank-3-blank-2. The brick house is two storeys plus attics with dormer windows in a hipped roof. The central door has tapering brick pilasters beside it and a pediment above. There are six windows regularly spaced on the south front with in the centre a pair of blind windows; above the latter is a sundial with the date 1699. The north wing is not square to the rest of the building, suggesting that there had been an earlier house on the site. Fenestration is now eighteenth-century sash windows but these replacements mask the earlier, less delicate windows.

In 1700, Sir Walter St John founded the Sir Walter St John School, Battersea, on Battersea High Street, now Thomas’s Battersea. Sir Walter’s arms are prominent on the building and above the present day entrance is the school motto: “Rather death than false faythe”. The original buildings were replaced by William Butterfield in 1858-59. They comprised a school room and a headmaster’s house but the latter was replaced in 1913 by a great hall and gymnasium designed by A.H. Ryan Tennison. At the same time a south wing was added but this 1913 building was bombed in the Second World War and replaced in 1951. North of the great hall, T. Denny added a new wing. In 1961, a science block in concrete and purple brick was added to complete the quadrangle, a small portion of which peeps out at the southern end of the frontage to Battersea

High Street. On the ground floor is a music practice room: a small boy was having a drum lesson when the writer walked past during the preparation for these notes. Butterfield’s portion is red brick mostly in English Bond but this is broken up by the tall band of white brick diaper in header bond at the top of the ground floor. There is a similar band below the eaves and in the gable. There are dormer windows above this brickwork band. Butterfield’s successors also used red brick. Black brick diaper was used in the 1913 portion.

The second of the three Roman Catholic churches of Battersea is that dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Trott Street. F.A. Walters designed this red brick building in English Bond in 1892. Approached from the south part of Trott Street the most striking feature is the substantial tower, in the lower part square but with its upper part octagonal and surmounted by an octagonal spire. The tower is flanked by transepts, the full height of the clerestoryed nave. Beyond this tower bay are four bays of unequal length for the nave with aisles; there is a (liturgical) north transept with a circular window on the side of the nave and a short chancel beyond. On the west side of the church (liturgically north) is a modern addition which shows how exciting architecture can work. Entry to the building is now through a red brick drum with a slanting, glazed, circular roof. Automatic air-tight doors permit entry but can be kept firmly closed when the building is not in use. Outside the church fabric a glazed roof lights a large social space and the new building also provides kitchen and toilet facilities. Earlier, Greenhalgh & Williams had added a chapel dedicated to St John Bosco and reordered the sanctuary in 1970. The original presbytery is beyond. It was built in the same red brick as the church.

Katherine Mackay Low (1855-1923) was a philanthropist in whose memory the Katherine Low Settlement was founded in 1924. Three principal buildings are on the site. No 108 Battersea High Street is a three-storey, five bay house at right angles to the street. It was built of red brick laid in Flemish Bond with stucco for the window surrounds. Opposite the house, in the lea of a railway embankment, is a modern concrete building with much glass at the front, a children’s nursery. The west wall, to the street, is buff brick. Approaching from the north what strikes one about the complex is neither of these but a two- storey building with an attic with a gable to Battersea High Street. This has six bays to Orville Road. The lower part is glazed green brick in Flemish Bond with red brick above. The green glazed brick continues as an arch above the door in the sixth bay.

The original Christ Church on a triangular site between Battersea Park Road and Cabul Road was bombed on 21 November 1944. Built in 1849 to designs by C. Lee and T.T. Bury this seems to have been quite a large building with the chancel flanked by vestries and transepts; a nave with a clerestory and flanked by aisles. There was a north-west porch tower with an octagonal spire and a south porch. Lee and Bury chose to work in a fourteenth-century style and to build in stone. The new church was built to designs by Thomas Ford in 1959 as a modern brick church interpreting the traditional arrangement of nave with clerestory, aisles, and sanctuary. The nave is light by a series of Diocletian windows placed above the level of the flat roofs of the aisles. There is a brick tower set in the centre of the north side. Ford’s building is in buff brick in Stretcher Bond. Originally, there had been a school attached, but it was rebuilt in 1907-08 to designs of A.H. Ryan Thompson. John Burns had been a pupil in its earlier form as the National School, for which the trustees were established on 23 October 1865. Neither building is extant.

AROUND CLAPHAM JUNCTION Buildings at the crossroads formed by Falcon Road, Lavender Hill, St John’s Road, and St John’s Hill

The tracks through Clapham Junction Station are reputedly the busiest in the world. A glance at a map shows no fewer than five different lines converge here from a northerly direction and that two depart southwards. Managing the traffic flow, with some trains stopping at the station and others passing through at speed, has always been a major headache for railway companies. Apart from the outer wall of the railway station, the buildings around the crossroads where the north-south route of Falcon Road and St John’s Road meets the east-west line of Lavender Hill and St John’s Hill are of considerable interest.

In 1887, the Falcon Hotel, on the south-west corner of the crossroads, was rebuilt with the use of a great deal of stone in the public face, the curving façade round the corner at the junction. The dull red brick in English Bond between the windows is accentuated by the use of black pointing.

West of the public house is the relatively new brown brick wall of the outside of Clapham Junction Station. The wall includes shop fronts and masks a short shopping mall. Food shops and other shops selling basic necessities is an idea imported from the United States. Grand Central, New York, has always had a covered food market; you walk through it and come face-to-face with the Chrysler Building.

Opposite the railway station is the forbidding presence of the Grand Theatre, St John’s Hill, a gaunt façade in a very dull red brick with towers on either side. I thought that theatres were meant to be enticing and jolly places!

At the south-east corner of the cross roads is one of the great surprises of Battersea, the buildings for the local department store; when built it still traded as Arding & Hobbs, and still proudly proclaiming this all the way along above the original first floor windows as well as by the ‘A&H’ at the top of every stone pilaster on the frontages to Lavender Hill and St John’s Road. The firm was founded in Wandsworth in 1876 but has long been situated in Battersea on its corner of St John’s Road and Lavender Hill. There was a major fire in 1909, following which the directors commissioned a new building from James Gibson, an architect much better-known for his civic buildings but who had previously designed the main Oxford Street store of Debenham & Freebody, now Debenhams: the Battersea store is now a branch of that chain. The store is four storeys high with both a basement and an attic; when built the attic was the bedrooms of the store’s unmarried (mainly female) assistants. This was common in Edwardian stores from London to Chicago, if not San Francisco. A BBC televison programme some years ago interviewed two ladies who had worked at Robert Sayle in Cambridge and had lived in, taking one back to her former bedroom (now a storeroom). When Blundell Brothers of Luton built a new store on Market Hill, Luton, in 1892, the top floor was reserved for dormitories for the assistants. In the mid- 1970s Bourne & Hollingsworth of Oxford Street, London, still maintained a hostel for their employees. And one reason for the loggia on the top floor of Carson Pirie Scott on State Street, Chicago, was to provide a walking space for the employees from their accommodation. The ground floor of Arding & Hobbs is almost completely glass but this has been renewed and reconfigured several times. The first floor exterior is the original wooden frames for the glass with the band of dull stucco (?concrete) above with the name ‘Arding and Hobbs’ prominently displayed several times. The second and third floors have stone around the windows but between these are panels of red brick in Flemish Bond. At the corner is a circular tower rising above the roof line. The presence of so much glass on the ground and first floors reveals the steel frame around which the building was constructed but several of the east-west internal walls are load bearing. The back of the store, on Ilminster Gardens, is in the same high quality red brick as the two main frontages but this has no stone.

Eglwys Bresbyteraidd Cymru, Capel Unedig de Llundain Clapham Junction, at 30 Beauchamp Road is the Welsh Presbyterian Church for the area. It was built in 1896 but the architect appears not to have been recorded. It was extended westwards in 1924 to the designs of F.R. Gould Wills. Built on a sloping site, the worship space sits above a basement; access is via steps at the east end or though the double entry in the west extension. The building is red brick in Flemish Bond. The east front is three bays and the side walls have four bays. There are labels below the tall windows of the side walls and those either side of the narthex. The back wall to the west is stock brick.

At the top of Lavender Sweep is St Andrew and Clapham United Reformed church, a rebuilding in 2001-02 following a fire at the earlier building of 1896 by Edward Beckett Lamb (son of the better- known E.B. Lamb). The modern building is multi-purpose: it includes provision for a nursery. Richard Harman’s building has the lower portion of its outer walls in a light yellow brick but the upper part is covered with an unrendered concrete wash.

From here there is a distant view of St Mark’s church, Battersea Rise, the first of William White’s six Battersea churches, designed in 1872 and built over the next two years; it became a parish in 1883. The church occupies a triangular site on the corner of Boutflower Road. It was built of orange brick with red brick bands in a thirteenth-century style on a sloping site, so that east end is built above a vaulted crypt. Above the crypt, the chancel with a canted apse has both an ambulatory and a clerestory. The nave has low aisles. There is a south-west tower with a low, tiled, octagonal spire: the latter described as “ugly” by VCH but by the time Cherry came to view it, this had been replaced by “a shingled timber spire of picturesque Continental origin”. Apart from being the first of White’s Battersea churches, St Mark’s is important for the choice of an experimental structural technique using a concrete core which was then faced with brick: this was both expensive and time-consuming. The windows are plate tracery in moulded brick and the external brickwork includes some diaper. Schools and a church hall were built on an adjacent site in 1866; the low building for the schools has half-hipped roofs. In 1902, the infant school had 99 pupils.

CIVIC BATTERSEA Lavender Hill from Clapham Junction to the boundary with Lambeth

Civic Battersea is synonymous with an early phase of the work of Edward William Mountford (1855- 1908), a long-term resident of Battersea in late-nineteenth-century. Four buildings stand out, two now in other uses. In order of construction they are the Baptist Chapel, Northcote Road, of 1887-89; the Central Library, Lavender Hill, of 1888-90; the former Battersea Polytechnic on Battersea Park Road, of 1890-91; and the former Battersea Town Hall (now Battersea Arts Centre), Lavender Hill, of 1892- 93. At this period, Mountford’s work was not dissimilar to his buildings in his native town of Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, where a small group of members saw his cottage hospital, the Ellen Badger Memorial Hospital of 1898. Mountford became a specialist in designing in three distinct building types. Following his early work at Battersea Polytechnic, he went on to design several large- scale educational buildings, including the early buildings of the Northampton Institute, now City University, and Liverpool College of Technology with an extension to the public library as part of the group which includes the circular Picton Reading Room and the Walker Art Gallery. Mountford became an accomplished designer of civic buildings; Sheffield Town Hall was a competition success of 1890, and it was followed by town halls in Lancaster and Hitchin, Hertfordshire, the latter with Geoffry Lucas, an architect from the Hitchin and Luton banking family, related also to the Gurneys and the Barclays of Norwich. In 1900 Lucas had won the original competition which had been judged by Mountford. The most triumphant of Mountford’s buildings is the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, built on the site of Dance’s Newgate Prison, which in turn is on the site of a medieval brick- built gate in the walls of the City of London. Mountford’s building is the section with the great dome and the statue of justice above it. Unfortunately, Edward Mountford spent the last five years of his life in a wheelchair, without any diminution of his intellectual powers. When the Central Criminal Court was opened, he was

14 unable to rise from his wheelchair to bow to Edward VII. Mountford’s practice was continued by and the unfinished buildings were completed by his long-term chief assistant, Frederick Dare Clapham (1873-1914) who in 1907 had become a partner in Mountford’s practice. Most of this work was in Lancaster where Clapham was responsible also for the new fire station, but as noted above, one of the buildings on which work was in progress was Battersea Polytechnic.

Battersea Public Library was the first of Edward Mountford’s civic buildings in his place of residence. It was also his first competition success. The competition was held in 1888, a year after the newly- formed Borough of Battersea adopted the various Public Libraries Acts, the first London authority to do so. The three storeys with a basement are in red brick in English Bond. Pevsner complains that the building is still “in the domestic Pont-Street-Dutch tradition”. The present writer thinks it is a fun building with its octagonal turret on the west corner of the street front. The building has adapted well to modern ideas of library practice; the local history room on the left-hand side of the first floor at the front is a very pleasant room in which to work. At the rear, with an entrance on Altenberg Gardens is the Reference Library of 1924, designed by the Borough Engineer, T.W.A. Hayward. The street façade is in red brick in English Bond; the side walls and the side walls of the main public library are in London stocks, also laid in English Bond. The red brick frontage of the reference library has a prominent entrance which is kept closed except as an emergency exit.

South of Lavender Hill is Altenburg Road with the Roman Catholic church dedicated to St Vincent de Paul, built in 1907. It was John Kelly’s second work in London: in May 2013, members viewed St Patrick’s, Soho Square, of 1891-93. At St Vincent’s, John Kelly designed a brick church with stone dressings in a Romano- Romanesque style. The red brick is laid in English Bond with every fourth row prominently in deep red stretchers. There is a big Diocletian window on the upper part of the west front. The side walls, also in red brick in English Bond, are a blank bay at the west end followed by four bays with large windows. As designed there would have been a tall campanile at the west end on the south side, but the latter was not built. On the first bay of the south side, the scars left by places for keying in the brickwork of the projected tower can be seen. Presumably, the finance was not available. It would have been in red brick and similar in concept to the campanile of St Patrick’s, Soho Square. Later at St Vincent’s, a narthex was built using a dull red brick laid in English Bond but without the use of deep red bricks seen above was built at the west end. This includes the tympanum with a mosaic reported by Cherry in Buildings of England: London 2: South. The presbytery is the adjacent large house, one of several on the east side of Altenberg Gardens.

Battersea Arts Centre was built as the Battersea Municipal Buildings by the newly-created borough in 1892-93 to designs by Edward Mountford. With the government-inspired take over of Battersea by the much larger neighbouring borough of Wandsworth, its civic function was superfluous. The Municipal Buildings are actually two buildings, the town all at the front and, to the north, various places of assembly at the rear, known as the Grand Hall and the Lower Hall. There was a fire destroying the roof and part of the walls of both of these earlier in 2015. Damage was greatest on the west side but this allowed constructional details to be seen. The south front, facing Lavender Hill is symmetrical, in red brick laid in English Bond but using Header Bond for the curved corners of the outer bays. The whole uses stone dressings and in the centre of the five-bay front is a portion almost completely in stone. On the ground floor is a semi- circular porch, with a balcony above: it was here that John Burns was proclaimed the local member of parliament after the general elections of the period from 1892 to 1918. Prior to counting centres in sports halls, each constituency’s count was undertaken in the local town hall and the result broadcast from its balcony. The sculpture on the pediment is by Paul Montford and shows Labour and Progress with Art and Literature instructing the youthful figure of Battersea. The main building goes back by three wide bays and is three storeys high on the sloping site. On the west side, the end bay is the Town

Hall Keeper’s flat. (Both side walls are covered with scaffolding and so difficult to see, particularly on the west side). Internally, there is small entrance space leading to a much larger staircase hall. The stairs begin as a single flight but divide into two to the first-floor gallery. The former council chamber had a segmental barrel vaulted ceiling. The halls at the rear are fire damaged but details of the brickwork are clearly visible. The north gable is intact but the west side is severely damaged. The north gable is four bricks thick. The hall had been able to seat no fewer than 1,140 people. It was entered on the east side through a (now completely damaged) octagonal foyer surmounted by a glazed dome. Bridget Cherry reported much marble was used in the foyer. The grand hall had a louvre on the ridge through which flames could been seen when the fire was raging.

The Church of the Ascension, Lavender Hill, was built for an ecclesiastical district established in 1871. Construction began in 1876 under the direction of James Brooks but work after 1882 was undertaken by another practice, Micklethwaite and Somers Clark, chiefly J.T. Micklethwaite. However, they used the foundations laid for Brooks’ church. According to Bridget Cherry, this big, red brick church took over a quarter of a century to complete and even then it did not have its bellcote over the junction between nave and chancel or the planned south-west porch-tower external to the south aisle, both of which were envisaged in Brooks’ original design. The substantial base of the south-west tower is self-evident and off-putting. On its door is the inscription “the pence of the poor paid for this door 1884”. The red brick is laid in English Bond. The inspiration for the design was the buildings of the Cistercians: nave and chancel in one with aisles moving seamlessly into the ambulatory. Aisles and ambulatory are without fenestration; the upper part of the nave and the chancel has single lancets, filled with stained glass, nine in the nave and two above the single-storey south transept. The apsidal sanctuary has nine lancets in total. On the north side, there is a double height transept. At the west end, completed in 1893-98, are three tall lancets with short lancets above the spaces between these with in the centre above them a small circular window. Below the windows is a war memorial: Christ on the cross flanked by smaller figures of St John and His mother. Despite the “pence of the poor” paying for the south door and the present lack of a bellcote and the tower never having been completed, this is a church where expense seems not to have been spared. It was specifically designed to inspire those of the Anglo-Catholic persuasion: both the church’s notice board and its website inform us that both on Sundays and on each weekday “Mass” is celebrated, not Holy Communion or the Eucharist. In stark contrast to the glass the raw red brick is exposed throughout the interior although the round piers of the nave arcades and the square piers of the ambulatory are stone, the latter with carved capitals. Roof structures are wagon-roof for the nave, wooden vault for the chancel and lean-to exposed rafters for the aisles and ambulatory. Brooks began with a morning chapel, a place for early morning weekday services; this has a stone vault on clustered piers. Does this vault indicate that after the initial burst of fund raising, the necessary finance was less than what had been expected? The failure to complete the tower seems to bear this out. The bold exterior with its two semi-circular east ends and a pyramidal top to a stair turret next to the morning chapel is extremely striking. It was Brooks’ original concept.

North of Lavender Hill and bounded on the north by the railway is The Shaftsbury Park Estate centred on Brassey Square with its entrance marked by a pair of former shops with corner turrets culminating in a spire-like top: Bridget Cherry thought these to be sufficient interest to merit a black-and-white photograph in The Buildings of England: London 2: South. The adjacent houses on Grayshott Road bear the date 1874. The site had been a market garden run by one Poupart The estate was built by the Artizans, Labourers and General Dwellings Company between 1872 and 1877; their architect was Robert Austin. The estate contains 1,135 cottage dwellings of three types, with between five and eight rooms. The brick is stock brick and both red and black bricks were used for emphasis. Brassey Square,

16 named after the railway contractor Thomas Brassey, has larger buildings including a block of flats and a row of shops. These buildings are also emphasised by corner turrets and Gothic details. The estate is now administered by the Peabody Trust although some houses are privately owned. Towards the end of the building phase, Holden Street School was opened by the London School Board on 5 February 1877. It was the sixth school opened by the London School Board in Battersea and in 1902 had 1,595 pupils aged between five and thirteen.

THE PARK TOWN ESTATE Around Queenstown Road

The walk in this section is along Queenstown Road from Lavender Hill to the former London and South Western Railway’s Queen’s Road Station; it is essentially south of the main line from London Waterloo to Clapham Junction and beyond to Southampton, Salisbury, and Exeter.

At the northern end of Cedars Road, just beyond the crossroads with Lavender Hill, Queenstown Road, and Wandsworth Road (Lambeth) is a former Horse and Carriage Dealers, later a Motor Engineering Company. The frontage to Cedars Road is painted white and various superimposed layers of black lettering can be seen. The side walls are stock brick, which can be presumed to have been used for the front. The brick is laid in a modified form of Flemish Bond. The complex has been converted into housing.

On the extreme edge of Lambeth is Clapham Baptist Church, Wandsworth Road, with the more recent building entered from Victoria Rise. This is stock brick in Flemish Bond. The side walls are six bays, of which the four central ones have windows. At the rear is the school rooms of three wide bays followed by three narrow bays; this has red brick accents within the stock brick.

The Park Town Estate occupies a kite-shaped area bounded by Broughton Street to the north, Silverthorne Road to the east, Robertson Street to the south, and Stanley Grove to the west. It is split by Queenstown Road and has St Philip’s church at its centre, the (liturgical) north side of which is on the east side of Queenstown Road. From this quadrilateral of roads there are three extensions: along Queenstown Road to the north, weaving under the railway arches to Queen’s Circus and the south end of Battersea Bridge Road; along Queenstown Road to the south to the junction with Cedars Road; and a rectangular block to streets east of the southern part of Silverthorne Road; these include Heathfield Primary School, St Rule Street, an example of the work of E.R. Robson for the London School Board. Beginning in 1863, the Park Town estate was developed by Philip Flower on the former Longhedge Farm, which was freehold land. Flower employed J.T. Knowles the younger (subsequently Sir James Knowles) as his architect. Three years earlier, Knowles had designed an estate of villas on Clapham Common and Cedars Road, Clapham; (at the crossroads at the south end of Queenstown Road, its continuation is Cedars Road). Bridget Cherry considered Park Town to be a “humbler version of Knowles’ Cedars Estate”. The grand idea was to link Clapham with Chelsea using the new Chelsea Bridge, opened in 1858, but the building of so many railway lines meant that the concept was flawed. At the northern end of Queenstown Road is a row of former houses, now mostly flats, where the ground floor has been pushed forward to accommodate retail premises. These are in a coarse brown brick and executed in an equally coarse Gothick style with heavy surrounds to the twin lancet windows. The Survey of London suggested that they were by another architect and not by Knowles or one of his assistants. The houses on St Philip’s Street, to the east of Queenstown Road, are plain grey-brick terraces of the 1860s. Similar terraces survive on Stanley Grove and Broughton Street on the west side of Queenstown Road. Similar houses were built in the northern extension of Park Town in Southolm Street, opposite the LSWR Queen’s Road Station.

Around St Philip’s church are somewhat grander houses with porches and the houses at the street corners opposite the (liturgical) east and west ends of the church have an extra storey. This suggests careful planning by the architect. St Philip’s church was designed by the estate architect, J.T. Knowles the younger, in 1869; the parish was established in the following year; this probably occurred at the same time as the church was completed. This large church was built of ragstone and set within a small, raised, grassed area imitating a churchyard (by 1870 burials were no longer permitted in urban churchyards). The church has an apsidal chancel, a nave with a low clerestory, low aisles outside the five-bay nave arcades, but VCH Surrey reported that there was no tower. There is now a short tower. The roofs are slate and there is a fleche over the chancel arch. Queenstown Road seems to have been the last part of the estate to be developed. There is a series of red brick terraces, three and four storeys, often with the frontages pushed out to accommodate retail premises, particularly on the west side. On the east side many of the properties are flats with two front doors under each arched entry. Just south of the church on the east side of Queenstown Road are a group of five semi- detached pairs of houses to which Cherry draws attention. The northernmost two pairs, nos. 118-120 and 114-116, were designed by Thomas Jekyll (1827-1881) in 1875. Both are large semi-detached pairs of two storeys with attics built in red brick laid in English Bond with a darker red brick used at the corners and for the window surrounds. But these differ in details. Of these, each of the northern pair, 118-120, is two outer bays brought forward and two inner bays recessed, giving eight bays in total for the whole. Each of the southern pair, 114-116, has unfenestrated brickwork at the centre of the whole block, then two broad bays and a narrow outer bay. There are two-storey cottages on St Philip’s Street by Jekell behind these houses. They also are in red brick. The pairs of houses immediately south of these were covered in scaffolding when these notes were being compiled but these three pairs, nos. 102-112, were a scheme designed in 1879 by Thomas Bailey, the architect to the London School Board from 1884 to its abolition in 1904 and then the first chief architect of the Inner London Education Authority until his retirement in 1910. The builder was a Norfolk man, Thomas Howes, who was going to live in one of them. Covered in scaffolding, the buildings could not be viewed adequately. Number 112 was designed by Bailey as his own home with two storeys and an attic in the front gable; the adjacent house is without a gable. Bailey only lived there for a few years, moving first to Clapham and later to Norwood: i.e. further out with each move. It is symptomatic of Battersea’s late-nineteenth-century middle-class equivalent of Detroit’s “white flight”.

At the northern end of the estate is Ridley Hall Evangelical Church, Broughton Street, on the east side of Queenstown Road, originally built in 1884 and rebuilt in 1977. This building in stock brick with red brick accents, all laid in Stretcher Bond, is seven bays wide with five windows in the centre: the centre window is round-headed the others have segmental heads. The building is attached to the minister’s house, a corner house from the Park Town development. Opposite is a commercial building in the same brick as the evangelical church.

The LCDR had its Longhedge Locomotive and Carriage Works east of Silverthrone Road. Several brick buildings with round-headed lancet windows remained in the early 1980s. Joseph Cubitt was the designer.

The Queen’s Road Station of the LSWR is in red brick laid in Flemish Bond; the station building adjoins the railway line on the north side.